


all else perished

by keskasi



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bittersweet, Historical, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Reincarnation, Soulmates, The death isn't really of the permanent variety, Unhealthy Relationships, kind of, wild historical inaccuracies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-25
Updated: 2014-02-25
Packaged: 2018-01-13 17:16:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1234630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keskasi/pseuds/keskasi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are only so many times a person can fall before the world becomes a vertical blur. Life, Stiles has found, is much the same way. There are only so many times a person can be born, live, and die before the epochs start to smear into one long, eternal day. Or night, as the case may be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all else perished

**Author's Note:**

> My irl friend wanted reincarnation fic, and that was a few months ago, so this isn't 3B compliant at all. Regard this as very much an AU. For more info on the major character death and unhealthy relationship, please check the end notes.
> 
> This was a blast to write, and I hope you all have a blast reading it.

“You shouldn’t have been there.”

“I just wanted to help.”

“You almost got Isaac _killed_ , Stiles! How many times are you going to put us in danger before you realize that we don’t _need_ you!”

Stiles gets it. He really does. So he leaves.

 

***

 

There are only so many times a person can fall before the world becomes a vertical blur. Life, Stiles has found, is much the same way. There are only so many times a person can be born, live, and die before the epochs start to smear into one long, eternal day. Or night, as the case may be.

Still, Stiles remembers the first time he met Derek.

They call it the Iron Age now, but then it was just fog, and hills, and the moon rising overhead, huge and round-faced, cherub-like in its innocence. Of course, anyone who thought the moon was innocent was a fool.

A Hunter’s Moon, swollen and orange.

It comes to Stiles in bits and pieces, shattered in its distance but somehow clearer than any other memory.

Stiles had been a Druid—of course. A human but not quite, one foot entrenched firmly in the ether of another world. Maybe that was why they always seemed to find each other, both straddling the line between light and shadow. Stiles doesn’t know anymore.

“What are you doing here?”

He still hears those words in his sleep. Even then, he knew. He doesn’t know what he said, slick with ceremonial oil and dusted with myrtle from distant shores. It was a Hunter’s Moon, after all.

“It’s dangerous at night. Anything could eat you.”

Derek didn’t eat Stiles that night, yellow eyes warm and inviting in the darkness. He might as well have, though, in the end. Stiles was still utterly gutted.

 

***

 

One moment, he’s asleep and tracing the threads of a distant memory, and the next, he’s upright in bed, soaked with sweat. Derek’s just inside the window. His skin prickles like racing fire, and he hates himself.

“Can I help you?”

Derek shuffles closer, purposefully broadcasting each step he takes. He pauses by Stiles’ desk, stiff and drawn, marble. “You were upset.”

“What gave you that impression?” Stiles snaps. He twists the comforter in indecision before throwing it off and heaving himself off the bed. Hot pain twists up his stomach, and he flinches inwards, but the trouble’s on the inside. His ribs are broken.

“I didn’t mean what I said, you know,” Derek says, abrupt. Derek has a way about him that Stiles can’t really describe, other than to say that he’s a beautiful train wreck.

“We really do need you. That’s why you can’t put yourself in situations like that.” Derek’s voice is soft with contrition, and yes, Stiles is upset, but it feels like he’s always upset these days, and he never was able to stand his ground when it came to Derek.

It’s still hard not to feel the slick panic curling up his spine when Derek says “we” instead of “I.” When he _means_ “we” instead of “I.”

“I know,” he says.

It’s logical—he isn’t as strong in this life as in others. It’s a shame. Derek needs someone to protect him, sometimes. Stiles scrubs a hand through his grown-out hair and is immensely glad the light is still off. He doesn’t want to see Derek’s face, stony with pure inerasable heartbreak peeking through. Not heartbreak because of Stiles, of course. Stiles never had a heart to break; he can hardly do it to other people, let alone Derek.

“Hey, how did you even get in? This is a fifth floor apartment. I’m not sixteen anymore, you know, this somehow feels even more like B and E.”

“I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

“What’s that?”

“Lie.”

Stiles blinks in the dark. “I’m not lying.”

“You sound like you are.”

Then he’s gone.

Stiles has met Derek in every life. He should know how to deal with him by now, but maybe _that’s_ why they keep meeting: Stiles never figures him out. Not in the way he can’t figure out the point of a stupid question, but in the way that he can’t figure out the solution to a riddle.

He could spend lifetimes trying to solve Derek. He has.

Fate is a bitch, though. Countless lives together, and this is the first where Derek doesn’t even seem to want him.

 

***

 

They meet in Greece.

Well, they meet everywhere. Stiles is partial to Greece.

He’s the Oracle at Delphi, the Pythia. A woman in this life, obviously. It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes even Fate is forced to make ends meet, he supposes. Or she simply has an odd sense of humor.

The vapors in the Temple twist like living, breathing things in the far dark reaches of the chamber, the firelight caressing the face of the man like a holy priest, timid and beautiful, when he pushes inside.

He has come a long way. Stiles can tell at once. The distance between them never matters, though, because Derek always finds him.

“Hello weary traveler,” says Stiles, smirking because he _knows_ he _knows_ he _knows_ what’s going to happen.

“I’m not weary,” says Derek, petulant and frowning. “How could I be weary, after seeing you?”

Derek has yet to realize, in any life, what a truly spectacular line that was.

Stiles preens, stepping off his tall, spindly throne in the vapors to draw as close to Derek as he’s allowed. “No rest for you? Well, have you anything else? A question for the Pythia? You wolves always do.”

(Derek’s eyes flash blue and cold, but Stiles doesn’t like to remember that part of Greece)

“You know?”

“I know _everything_.” He’s still preening, creeping closer to Derek, the vapors giving him strength and power, filling his mind with all of the beautiful, spinning threads of their lives, future and past. He presses close to Derek, who shudders, feels the warmth of his body under his cloak all the way to his very bones. Like a moth to flame—a surprisingly apt metaphor.

“Everything?” Derek asks, breath ghosting over the shell of Stiles’ ear. “What am I going to ask you?”

Derek’s shivering when Stiles slides down his body to the slick, warm floor, long hands latching like talons into him. He never lets go, once he has him. He never has.

 

***

 

“Hey, you should bring Star Wars to the next pack meeting,” Scott says, bouncing down onto Stiles’ bed with a whoosh.

“Why?”

“Because Derek said I was the Luke Skywalker to his Obi Wan the other day. I think he was being sarcastic, but, you know.”

Stiles swivels slowly away from his computer to level his incredulous gaze at Scott.

(Scott is a beautiful soul. Princes and saints can’t compare to Scott’s burning kindness, despite his fuck-ups; then again, he probably was a prince, and maybe even a saint, in some distant history book. Stiles doesn’t know how he got along without him, and has vague designs to hunt him down again. He probably wouldn’t find him.  


He sometimes sees specters from past lives in the faces around him, like Fate is taunting him with his memory. It’s not like he has anyone to ask about how it all works, exactly—even a werewolf might funnel him into a straightjacket, and the Druids are all but gone, now.

But, from what he’s gathered, everyone is reborn, lined up in time like little phoenixes. Not everyone, however, has the divine privilege of watching the person they love stolen from them time and time again. Stiles likes to think he’s special in all of it, wonders, sometimes, if there are others like him and Derek. Cursed.)

“And?” Stiles asks, because he feels himself being sucked in to the sinkhole of memory.

“And? Dude.”

“What?”

Scott only graces him with a particularly unimpressed look.

Stiles reddens. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” He doesn’t talk about the _thing_. Well, he talks about the thing with Derek, in some lives, but Derek isn’t _talking_. “I don’t want to talk about what you’re talking about,” he amends.

“Why? It’s not like you’re sixteen anymore.”

And Stiles definitely doesn’t want to think about Scott knowing since he was sixteen. He’s definitely keeping an eye out for him in future lives.

It’s hard to explain why Stiles’ thinks—knows that this life is different. He’s met Derek in every way he can imagine. Years have passed by, decades and the blink of an eye, before they’ve met—eyes across a crowded room—in the streets of Rome—in the still waters of a coral reef—in a bomb shelter in Berlin—on rolling hills under a Hunter’s Moon.

Derek doesn’t know, never does, but he feels it. He can feel the way he and Stiles fit together, like they were sculpted from marble and clay to embrace even until the end. Derek has always, _always_ wanted him. Even if he didn’t know why. Even if he didn’t remember it the way that Stiles did.

But now he doesn’t. And Stiles loves him too much to make him.

“Just, please forget about it, dude?” Stiles asks—begs—and Scott must see something in his face, because he gives him a long, sad look before he leaves.

 

***

 

Greece is Stiles’ favorite, mostly because it ends the right way. They die together, spears through their chests in a senseless attack from a neighboring city state, their blood pooling together on the floor, red like an Alpha’s eyes, warm and vibrant.

They’re not always so lucky.

He hates the Viking Age.

Derek leads a raiding party, and he is radiant in his braided hair, helmet gleaming dully in the overcast sea air. He recognizes what might have been Boyd, Erica, and Isaac among his many motley disciples, but it’s so hard to tell, looking at a memory blurred by time and tears. It could be wishful thinking, that they had somewhere to belong, once.

Swords are holy books for him, and his home is a ship, his heart buried deep in the sea. Stiles asks him about it once, the oddity of a werewolf at sea, but Derek only grins and asks if dogs cannot swim.

His arms and chest are smooth where the immortal scars of battle should be, but Stiles isn’t nearly so lucky. Thick scars twist around his arms, his legs, one snaking along his face. At night, when the moon glints like iron over their ship, Derek traces them, kisses Stiles’ eyes and murmurs prayers of luck.

“I can’t sail without my wind,” he would say, staring at Stiles like he was the world, sun and moon and stars and _sea_.

Death is nothing to Stiles, though. He always conquers it.

It’s a hard, rocky life, but the memories are only sharpened because of it. Stiles wishes that they weren’t. He wishes so hard it hurts. He knows hurt.

Derek’s crew is a mix of human and wolf, strong and sturdy, their loyalty a steady, beating thing, and Stiles trusts them with his most precious cargo. That was his first mistake.

An arrow does it, in the end. That something so small could fell something so titanic, so pure, never fails to floor Stiles. Sunlight glints off the waters sharply, the native tongue of France strange in his ears as the men descend upon them.

Derek is there, and suddenly his eyes widen and he reaches back and there’s an arrow there, long and black and sickly, protruding from the base of his neck. His eyes flash a brilliant red and find Stiles. They always find Stiles. He howls, and the sand shakes; his men stop, and the strange men roped in silver and _wolfsbane_ stop, and Fate herself pauses in spinning his story.

The strings holding Derek aloft are cut suddenly, or reveal that they never existed at all. He falls, blood black and stark against the pale sand, sliding wet and sticky over Stiles’ feet.

There’s a mistake. There has to be. Stiles must have been shot by the arrow. Derek is fine. Stiles is the one bleeding out on the ground. The blood is red, not black; crimson and vibrant and not dark and nightmarish.

He realizes he’s screaming when a hand is clamped over his mouth, realizes he’s fallen when he’s being hauled upwards. Funny how you don’t notice something until it’s absence. There’s a hole in his chest the exact size of the wound in Derek’s back. He wishes Derek _had_ eaten him years ago, covered in oil and myrtle like a perfect, willing sacrifice. He’s dead now, anyway.

The crew drags him back to the ship, howling. Like a wolf. He’s dead before they dock.

 

***

 

Through the centuries, Derek has never actually fallen in love with someone who wasn’t Stiles. He’s married others, he’s made love to and fucked and held hands and paid for dinner for other people, but not fallen in love. Stiles was under the impression—no, the firm conviction, the _unshakeable_ belief—that Derek’s love was just for him. So what is Derek doing with it now, if not offering it up to Stiles?

 

***

 

The air of myth lies heavily upon his shoulders, like a comforting blanket to keep out the chill of memory, during the Middle Ages.

He meets Derek young—when he’s still apprenticing with a scholar, when he still expects someone to swoop in through the chimney and whisk him away to a life of adventure. He can see himself as the head of a prolific gang of thieves, or as a merchant traveling to distant kingdoms.

He meets Derek when he’s nine, when the King requisitions Stiles as a servant. He’s too young to remember their lives, not completely. He has dreams, though. He sees the King’s young son, quiet and shy and stubbornly proud, and thinks he’s familiar.

Princes need servants, and after the fifth time Derek barges into his lessons—which the King had generously allowed him to continue—Stiles is only too happy to accept the position. No one else will. Derek can be gentle and witty, but he is, innately, a terror.

They grow up together. Those are Stiles’ favorite lives, because he gets to befriend Derek, gets to peer into his soul even before he remembers their traditions. It’s like falling in love all over again, when he wakes up and remembers, when he understands that the person he loves is the person he _loves_. It’s like finding out his whole life was a dream, before he met Derek.

“You’re crazy,” Derek tells him with a small, private smile, gazing up into his eyes, rosy in the early morning light filtering through his royal highness’s canopy bed. Stiles always wakes him up like this, warm and slow and full of care.

It should be good. But Derek is a prince and a werewolf, careful with his secrets, and Stiles is a peasant. When Derek marries a woman with raven hair and a family title, Stiles goes into the woods and screams.

The ravens scatter. He takes pride in that.

Watching Derek struggle between his new wife and Stiles is gut-wrenching, even though Stiles knows he’ll win. Fidelity is not something that princes and kings do, but Derek is more than any earthly prince. He wants to be _good_.

Stiles doesn’t wait around long enough to taint Derek any more than he has. He doesn’t quite throw himself on an assassin’s knife—he prefers the phrase _defends the future_ King, thanks—because it looked vaguely like a Hunter’s and because there’s never really any point anyway.

Gold eyes are the last thing he sees, sparking with memory.

 

***

 

Isaac tells him that Derek’s on a date, when he drops by the refurbished Hale house. Stiles has never lost his composure about this madness unless it’s at the end, so he waits until he’s firmly ensconced in his own apartment to shriek and claw at his clothes. Like that will claw away all of the goddamn memories. If fucking only.

“What happened here?” asks Lydia, voice shaking and on the verge of a wailing, Banshee scream. He knows she can smell the death that clings to him.

Glass is scattered on the floor in a myriad of microscopic rainbow pieces, a mosaic made of his dishes and some blown glass statues he’d found at the swap meet in college last year. He regrets smashing the statues; it’s the little things, after all, that make each new life stand out in his progressively blearing memory.

He knows he’s not handling this well.

“I’ll clean it up later, Lyds,” he says to her. “It’s just glass.” It’s never just anything, really. Just death, maybe.

She crouches next to him, her low heels crinkling delicately in the newspaper he’d ripped apart. She smells like strawberries, and Stiles can remember why he thought she seemed like such an amazing idea, so strong and mysterious, like he could drown out Derek’s absent—and then apathetic—voice. He wonders, again, if Derek ever _had_ fallen in love, without telling him. It hasn’t happened to him in so long, and it felt so different without the centuries shared, in a way, between them.

Lydia rubs a hand over his back and presses a kiss to his temple. She’s never gentle unless he’s already broken apart. He admires that about her. He wishes her could keep her, along with Scott.

When did _this_ life become the one he wanted to remember, out of all the others?

“What’s wrong, Stiles?”

He can’t help but laugh. It comes out bitter and sharp. “Would you believe me if I said I was cursed?”

 

***

 

At first, he hadn’t even realized it was a curse. In some ways, it was a gift—he never lost Derek, and their lives were always so much better together than they were apart. They were the wolf and the moon, and one could not exist without the other.

Then Salem happened, of course.

It was one of Stiles’ first spins in America, and he was shocked to realize how _long_ he’d been gone. Seemed like he never slept for long before he was opening his eyes on a new life, memories rushing into him. It happened when he was a teenager, usually, or a little younger. He got in about ten or so good years of solid, untouched memories before everything new was shoved to the side to make room for useless gravestone memories. One day, he was a child. The next, he was ancient. He still hasn’t been able to pin down a pattern for the amount of time he sleeps in between dying and that first, untouched memory of a new life. He doubts there is one.

Memory may have been fucking useless, most of the time, but magic was beautiful. If there was one thing Stiles loved more than Derek, it was magic. The sparkle and crack of some words and some will sent his heart into double time, the bubbly, fizzy pop of it humming through his blood. He truly regretted every life in which he didn’t have the aptitude for it. Sometimes Fate dealt difficult hands.

But _Salem_. Salem was _special_. Salem was the first time since the first Hunter’s Moon that he was truly, truly powerful. When he walked, Earth walked with him. It was glorious, and the first time that Derek saw him, his head snapped around so fast that even Stiles could hear the click of straining vertebrae.

He’s used to secrecy, of course. He lived through the Spanish Inquisition (though Derek didn’t). He blames the lost time for his carelessness.

Salem was one of the first times that they were heroes. Derek was cautious and happy, but Stiles was powerful and bored, and ruined him.

They protect the town from shifters, Wendigos, ghosts, fairies, and other werewolves. Now, he’s quietly shocked that he’s managed to stumble upon so many beacons in his lives. Then again, beacons do draw supernatural creatures, and Stiles is a moth. He didn’t think of it then, because the utter foreignness of the American magic and creatures was like pepper under his skin, an itch in his shoes saying _come and get us_.

He shouldn’t have listened.

The witch hunt starts innocently enough, and Stiles and Derek are amused at the children pointing fingers at the innocent when the guilty are just next door. They’re amused right up until they aren’t, right up until they burn the first girl. Derek smells the ash and sickly flesh in the air, but Stiles just smells heavy history.

They protect Derek. They’re so careful. They’re so careful to divert suspicion from Derek that they forget about Stiles.

Their bags are packed, Derek’s quiet farm forgotten, ready to go, when the townspeople barge in. Derek’s eyes flash, blue in this life, though he won’t tell Stiles why, and Stiles is so, so thankful that they’re carrying him out by his neck and not Derek.

Salem is beyond genuine trials at that point, careening recklessly down and down into Chaos. He doesn’t know if Hell exists, but he hopes that all of the judges and all of the jurors end up there. He hopes he sees them there.

He’s whirled into the courthouse, Derek hot on his heels, just long enough to be declared guilty. The lamps burn low, and Stiles thinks it’s only appropriate for him to die at night, when he was born. The judge’s face is lined and grotesque in the dying light, a monster fashioned out of panic and Fate. Stiles whispers urgently through the trial, empty words and circular arguments just loud enough for Derek to hear. He looks crazy, knows they all think he’s speaking to the Devil, but he can feel familiar eyes burning into his back surer than any flame.

Then he’s pushed outside, riding the wave of mania, and he sees the pyres.

Fire might actually kill him. He’s never been burned alive before, in all of his years, so he can’t be sure. It’s supposed to kill a witch—he isn’t sure about that, but it kills werewolves and humans. Fire is hard to escape. It could follow him into death.

They string him up like meat, douse him in oil and he’s a sacrifice again, a real Druid again, innocently offering himself up for the creatures that roam the hills at night. Derek pushes through the mob as they light the match, his eyes glinting a painful blue as he tries and fails to ward off panic.

Stiles hopes he doesn’t die. Fire licks up his body like the crackle pop of magic, intensified to boiling. It lingers on his arms, and he wants to tear this town apart. His mind goes white and black, body writhing as he tries on instinct to roll out of Hell. He wants this town to _suffer._ He stares into Derek’s eyes as long as he can, still whispering frantically, now just the three truest words he knows, over and over, a prayer and maybe a little bit of a spell.

He hopes Derek lives longer than it takes the town to bury his body. He never looks for any records, because he doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t ever want to know what happens to Derek after Stiles dies, if Derek is like Stiles—gutted. He doesn’t know what the worse truth would be.

At first, he hadn’t realized it was a curse. After Salem, when he opened his eyes and _remembered_ again, he honestly didn’t care.

 

***

 

For all that he’s always on the lookout for Derek, Stiles’ life doesn’t revolve around him. He studies, because there’s only so much you retain after centuries and he always cares about his parents and what they want for him and from him. He texts Cora, because she’s biting and beautiful and reminds Stiles of a countess he painted during the Renaissance. He stays up late at Lydia’s new house—mansion, really—watching new movies and playing poker, because she reminds him of absolutely no one. He visits the graves of barely-friends that he cared about, even now, though he’d known them for so much less time than other, countless faces he knew for decades. This life, overall, feels like a color photograph in a collection of blurry black-and-whites, sharper, somehow, more immediate.

He likes it. It’s good to feel something, even if it’s pain, after so long.

Mostly, though, he works—librarian, with some writing on the side to pay the bills for any werewolf-related emergencies. He’s always been able to turn a profit with his words, pen names a matter of course, and while his works aren’t sensational, by any means, they are heavy enough with mystic history that people seem to like them. They say he writes in the style of some previous authors, stream-of-consciousness, witty, dark when it matters. He smiles and nods, because he’s never been able to change his writing that much over the years, and is torn between pleased and scared that it shows.

He loves to talk about what an inspiration he was to himself, even though he’s talking about himself using fake names in the third person and that’s weird. He loves talking about his past lives in oblique references that are only funny for a moment, at least until he finds one of the novels he wrote in the forties sitting on Derek’s night stand, and then he doesn’t talk much about writing at all.

He hangs out with Scott, who, ever since their brush with death that was frankly more familiar than Stiles was willing to admit, goes to extra lengths to keep their minds occupied. Today it’s bowling. Stiles is winning, at least until Derek walks in with someone he _doesn’t know_.

The girl is beautiful, in the sweet way that Derek likes, and Stiles doesn’t hate her. He just hates that she’s with Derek. It’s _different_.

Derek must smell them right away, but he doesn’t acknowledge them because he’s an asshole. Stiles doesn’t know how his memories got so rose-colored, but he was clearly hallucinating his fonder remembrances of this douchebag.

He eventually saunters up while his beautiful, perfect, lovely girlfriend orders a pizza. Stiles bowls a gutter ball and Derek snorts. “Typical,” he mutters, with a grin on his face that’s small but could power a small city for the near future, which isn’t fair because Stiles had a perfect game going before Derek showed up. Derek, who seems light and content, a smile on his face when it lights on Stiles, fingers drumming over their table. Derek seems happy. _Apparently_ dating makes Derek happy. 

Who knew?

 _Stiles knew_.

He knows because during the forties, when he’d written that godforsaken book on Derek’s night stand, they were _going steady_ , which was terribly cute and made Derek scowl and blush every time he said it. It didn’t last long, of course, but that’s no reason why Derek should prefer the company of a _stranger_ , who doesn’t even know his favorite _food_ , to someone like Stiles.

Well, not someone like Stiles. Just Stiles.

Stiles knows, if not everything, then most things about Derek. The facts of him are worn into his skin.

“How’s your date going?” Stiles asks, sharper than he means to but still light because he’s a gentleman and a liar.

Derek frowns at him, little creases forming between his eyebrows. “Fine. Yours?” He grins at Scott, who descends into helpless giggles, the traitor. Stiles completely regrets the day that Scott and Derek became friends.

Derek and Scott trade barbs back and forth, cutting and fond. Stiles can’t bring himself to talk much. He’s nauseated. Derek seems happy, accepting Scott’s needling with a small smile. He glances over at Stiles every once in a while, probably to make sure that he hasn’t gone off and endangered the pack again (Derek has always trusted him) or gone to outright sell information to hunters (Derek has _always_ trusted Stiles). Stiles is boiling alive in his skin, and even though he’s never been much of anything at hiding what he’s feeling, especially from werewolves and especially from Derek, he makes an effort.

He’s willing to let Derek be happy. This Derek has more invisible scares than Stiles is used to, and he deserves happiness and love. The injustice of it makes him ache, but if Derek will be happier with a stranger, then so be it. It’s fine (he’s gutted) it’s all fine (he’s lost) it’ll turn out fine next time (what if there’s not a next time?).

It’s good to see Derek’s smile, even if it’s not for him.

He just draws the line at having it thrown in his face like he’s so much garbage on the edges of Derek’s life. So when Scott’s needling turns to his date, and Derek is tensing because Scott’s asking very serious Alpha Questions disguised as jokes, Stiles breaks.

“Did you need something, Derek? Because I think your date’s flirting with the bowling shoe guy.”

Derek turns to him with angry eyebrows and a confused frown. Stiles wants to die. He will leave this life behind if this agony will end. He means it.

He stares at Stiles for a good five seconds before Stiles snaps, “Seriously, dude, you’re intruding on bro-time.” He knows he sounds furious. He feels furious, even though he has no right. There’s just no frame of reference for this; Derek has _always_ loved him. He’s caught off-guard by this whole life, and he doesn’t know what to do. “Go _away_ , Derek.”

“Are you upset because I didn’t introduce her to the pack? Because you didn’t need to pretend to care, since it’s not going to work out anyways.” Derek’s tense as the string of a violin, his words singing fast and low over Stiles. Stiles would think he’d be sick of fighting with Stiles by now, but obviously not. He keeps coming back for more, and if that’s a manifestation of their _thing_ , then Stiles wishes it would stop.

Derek stalks away, and Stiles turns into Scott’s wrinkled expression. “What is up with you guys?” he asks, looking between Stiles’ flushed face and Derek chatting—chatting!—with his date. He’s got the shrewd look on his face that precedes serious reasoning, so Stiles shoves a bowling ball at him to ward him off.

Honestly, the thing that upsets him the most is that Derek thinks he’s _pretending_. Stiles always cares about Derek, all the way back, all the way back to the first Hunter’s Moon. He’s never been upset with Derek for not remembering before.

He is now.

 

***

 

World War I is awful in a dull gray way that still manages to be vividly painful. He’s French, Derek’s British, and they meet in the trenches under the roar of machine gun fire.

Derek’s the superior officer of their combined squadron, promoted in battle, struggling with the weight of command. It’s all very familiar, now. He stays with the men, eats and sleeps and fights with them, foregoing the officers’ quarters altogether.

They fight. Stiles is naturally insubordinate, Derek has a naturally stubborn temper, and there’s earth-shattering explosions everywhere and then one of their trademark acidic arguments ends in a bruising kiss, away from the eyes of the men. Stiles is light-headed. It’s not enough to make him forget about the war and the blood, but he’s fought in countless others and Derek soothes the fire in his limbs, a little.

They make plans, not often, but sometimes, in the still-quiet before an attack. They’re going to move to America, because once Stiles got a taste he decided he never wanted to leave, and buy a house in the woods and live forever. They survive the war, miraculously, and Stiles thinks _this is it. I can have this_.

He catches influenza four months after the armistice, still trapped in France. His body’s weak from the war.

The irony doesn’t escape him, thanks.

 

***

 

Lydia’s sitting on his bed, pretending to live tweet a work party that she should be at but isn’t because of his impending emotional frailty. “You should probably tell me what’s going on,” she says. Stiles fidgets. It’s not that he doesn’t want to, it’s just—yeah, he doesn’t want to.

He does. It’s like vomiting bleach.

“Stiles,” she says, quietly and without looking at him, when he finishes. She reaches blindly for his arm, claws at it like a lifeline. “ _Stiles_.”

“Yeah,” he breathes, because it’s slightly easier to inhale and exhale now that Lydia knows.

“Is this the first time that he’s…?” Stiles wants to finish her sentence, but he’s suddenly unable to speak around the prickly heat swelling up from his stomach, so he just nods. His head feels heavy. Lydia curls around him and pulls his head into her lap, carding her fingers through his hair. They sit together, breathing. It’s so odd that a single moment can feel so endless, even now when he’s near the end.

Lydia would talk about the fluidity of time if he were to mention it to her, he supposes. It’s so odd that he knows her so well—her, Scott, Isaac, Kira, Allison, Danny, Cora, even the ghosts of Boyd and Erica—when he’s lived countless times surrounded by paper cutouts of real people.

“Are you going to talk to him?”

Stiles stills. He’s never been very brave. Everything courageous he’s ever done is more because of recklessness or, well, Derek. He shakes his head, and she lets out a cut-off breath. He can tell that she’s having a hard time with this, not because she doesn’t believe him, but because she doesn’t understand _why_. She looks lost and horribly sympathetic and raw, words that should never be used to describe Lydia.

So he tells her about his lives. Partially, he wants to calm her down, but some part of him hopes that with enough information she’ll be able to figure this out. He hopes she’s able to understand this for him. He doesn’t think that he can, anymore. He doesn’t want what he thinks about all this to be right. He wants her to find another reason. A less painful one.

So he tells her about the aqueducts of Rome, about meeting Euler and Copernicus and the trenches of the Great War. He tells her about the first time he ever saw Derek, windswept and red-nosed but so, so warm, on a hill on the Hunter’s Moon. He tells her about growing up with the Druids, and she doesn’t mention how strange it is that he still remembers this, his first life, his only _deserved_ life, better than anything. He tells her about being selected as a sacrifice, and what that meant for him and how happy—no, elated—he’d been. About what an honor it was. About how goddamned relieved he was when Derek didn’t kill him, didn’t leave him to die.

He tells her how beautiful Derek was then, in full wolf form with glowing golden eyes, warm in the cool, cool night. She rubs his head through it all, lets him slide between memories like water, and he knows he’s not making much sense but she still nods and sighs in the appropriate places. By the end, he’s pretending he can feel enough to cry, and ignoring the wet tear tracks streaked onto her face.

“Why is this happening to you?” Lydia whispers. It sounds broken.

“I told you. I’m cursed.” He doesn’t laugh when he says it this time.

Lydia makes him call Scott when he calms down, and sits with him while he stutters through an explanation. Scott makes it the whole way through before bursting into tears, though he’s back to a dead alpha calm within a few breaths. Sometimes Stiles is so, so proud of him that he could faint. He’s known a lot of alphas through the years, but never one as steady and loving as Scott.

“We have to t-talk to Deaton,” he says, and Stiles is too outraged to call him on his slight hiccup. They’re all overreacting, really. He’s dealt with this for _centuries_ , and they think a wolf pack and a shady emissary in NorCal is going to have any fresh takes? Amateurs.

He agrees, though, and tells himself he’s not desperate.

 

***

 

“Are you an angel?” Derek asks, in a military hospital in Vietnam.

“No,” Stiles says, trying not to blush. “But you are a werewolf, and if we keep you hooked up to this you’re probably going to die.”

Derek freezes and stares at him while Stiles bustles around the IV lines in a grimy white medical uniform. He hates joining the military, because there’s no good reason for him to seek out death when it clings to him like it does, but he’d had too much knowledge of medicine _not_ to skate through medical school, and then he was drafted, so. Of course it led him to Derek with a blasted leg in a hospital bed.

“You guys don’t regenerate limbs, huh?” asks Stiles, mostly for conversation, but also because every time that they’ve been sliced up this bad over the years he hasn’t been able to stick around and see the aftermath

“ _Shhhhh_ ,” Derek hisses. “Do you have any idea how loud you talk?” He leans forward menacingly, wincing only slightly when he tugs his healing abdominals the wrong way.

“Please, almost everyone here is either asleep or on extreme amounts of painkillers. So?”

Derek slumps. “I’ve never exactly lost a leg before,” he mutters, staring down at his hands. It sounds bitter. He doesn’t say anything after that, and doesn’t look up at Stiles, and Stiles can understand a desire to be left alone, so he goes.

The next time he’s on the floor, back slick with sweat and somewhat sunburned, he feels Derek’s eyes trained unerringly on him, catches him looking away more times than he can count. So when he goes into the ward that night he pulls up a chair by Derek’s cot instead of leaving after checking blood pressures. There, he writes for a little, notepad angled into a patch of moonlight, until Derek stops pretending to be asleep.

Stiles looks up and there’s icy blue eyes trained on his pencil. “Hey,” he says.

“You don’t smell like a pack.”

“That would be because I don’t have one, sir,” Stiles says, grinning. The longer he’s around Derek, the easier it is to breathe. The world already seems a little brighter, even given Derek’s pallor and the horrors going on outside in the oppressive nighttime heat. Stiles gives into the feeling and slumps backwards over the chair with a heavy exhale. It’s a goddamn _relief_.

He does his best to ignore (for now) the way Derek’s eyes carefully track his movements.

“How do you know about us, then?”

“Grew up with people like you, I guess. It’s hard to explain.” It’s not _really_ a lie. Not enough for Derek to catch.

Derek meets his eyes. It’s electric. He can only see the young shine of them in the dark, and he can only imagine what he’s reflecting back at Derek. He doesn’t have to wonder for long, though. “You look ancient,” Derek says.

“I’m only twenty two, sir.”

“You smell like death.”

“There’s a war going on, sir.”

“Do I…Do I know you?”

Stiles’ breath stutters. He’s been kicked in the chest, and there’s a huge black hole where his insides should be. “Not right now, no.” He swallows. “Sir.”

Derek _never_ remembers. Not until it’s too late.

He reaches for Stiles’ hand, still wrapped around the pen, and gently spreads it between his own. He’s not much bigger than Stiles, usually, but his hands have always been huge. It must be a werewolf thing. They sear white-hot imprints onto Stiles hands, and he wouldn’t be surprised to see burns on his palm tomorrow.

“I feel like I know you.”

“It’s because I’m your doctor. That’s a demonstrated phenomenon with therapists and their clients, you know.”

“I feel like I’ve known you my _whole life_.”

“That’s…” The air has been sucked out of the room. “Weird.”

His hands squeeze Stiles’ like he’s a life vest before he sighs and slumps into his flat pillow. His face is so different now, and even though Stiles knows their bodies are about the same age, in this moment, Derek looks just as old as his soul actually is.

“I must be going crazy. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t assume…”

Stiles scoots closer and lays a hand on his elbow. “It’s fine. I…” He can’t exactly say why Derek might feel this way. “I feel the same.”

Derek smiles at the ceiling and squeezes at his hand again. From then on, Stiles visits every night, and they talk for hours sometimes. He doesn’t know what will happen—Derek could be sent home at any time—his leg isn’t regenerating—or Stiles could be reassigned, or the hospital could be firebombed. He finds he can push it to the back of his mind, though. So very rarely have they had the opportunity to talk like this, or the inclination, maybe. He hears about Derek’s life, and even though it seems shallow and impermanent, he finds he wants to hear it all.

This time, Derek is heavy, weighted down by the realities of twentieth century warfare and maybe, for the first time, consciously feeling the pressure of all of his previous lives. He’s brooding and quiet and hopelessly, quietly, guardedly romantic and it hurts Stiles to see the dark smudges under his eyes and the unshed tears behind his lids. Even so, Stiles didn’t think it was possible to fall more in love with him, but well. Life is full of terrible surprises.

After one especially trying day, Stiles is fanning himself by a quiet and still Derek, when suddenly Derek groans and says, “If there wasn’t a war…If I still had my leg…” Stiles flies to put his hands on him, quieting him with a silent, stolen kiss to his forehead.

“No, no, hey, it’s alright. This is, well, it’s not exactly _alright_ but c’mon. Derek.”

Derek fidgets until he’s able to breathe normally again. And then, suddenly, he’s hauling Stiles onto the cot and cradling him under his arm, which is patently ridiculous because Derek is the one in the hospital, here.

“You deserve so much better than all this, Stiles.”

It’s all Stiles can do not to laugh. If only Derek knew. Stiles is getting _exactly_ what he deserves, and it’s not Derek’s arm around him or Derek’s blue eyes in the dark. It’s what’s lurking and screaming outside.

“I feel like I know you so well,” Derek whispers. Stiles wants to cry.

Stiles dies first, this time. Does it really even matter how, anymore? He doesn’t want to think about what Derek did, trapped in a jungle hospital, without him. They probably plugged the IV back in.

 

***

 

That’s their last life before this one.

 

***

 

Deaton just sighs like the weight of the world is on his shoulders when Stiles tells him. Which, really, is unfair, because has he lived for millennia? No. No he has not.

“I can’t believe this,” Kira says. Her hand is twined with Stiles, and he appreciates the show of support, really, but part of him wants to run and hide and never speak to any of them again. It’s a passing thought, though, because on the whole he tries to savor moments with them. He knows he won’t see them when he wakes up the next time.

“You’re in quite the pickle,” says Deaton, and Stiles can already tell that this was a mistake.

“If you are cryptic, vague, or in any way mysterious and unhelpful, I will get Derek to rip out your lymph nodes,” Stiles says, giving him a shit-eating grin. Derek may not _like_ him in this life, but he’s always going to hold some sway. If it’s only because he’s pack, now, then so be it. He can make it work.

Deaton still looks unimpressed. “I’m a little confused as to why you felt the need to ask me if you already know why this is happening.”

Stiles cringes. “It’s all just theories.”

“You’ve had a great deal of years to think about this, Stiles. I don’t doubt that you have some very solid theories.”

The thing is, Stiles does. For all he rips on Deaton now, he was a Druid once, too, back when they were one with the Earth, and he still knows what that means. He knows what it means to renege on a sacrifice. He doesn’t like to think about it, though. Because as much as Stiles didn’t know the extent of a broken deal, Derek _really_ didn’t know, and the idea that he may have dragged Derek through centuries of blood is…somewhat unpleasant. Soul-shattering, even.

Knowing and suspecting all of that doesn’t mean he knows how to fix it.

“I’ll do some research. Talk to Derek.”

Stiles nods, says of course he’ll talk to him, of course he’ll watch his soul get ripped out through his heart. Of course he will.

_As if._

 

***

 

He manages to avoid Derek for a month. It’s weird, especially once Isaac and Danny find out, because then everyone is tiptoeing around Derek and his goddamn dates. Lydia shoots him looks that somehow manage to be both aloof and pained at the same time whenever Derek brings up maybe going to coffee with his stranger.

Eventually, Derek mentions that they’ve broken up. Stiles doesn’t know why he doesn’t feel happier. Then again, Derek doesn’t seem too beat up about it. They never did react normally.

Derek snaps one day during a pack meeting when they all keep looking at him like he’s kicked their puppy—and isn’t it ironic when Stiles is the puppy in this scenario? He kicks them out of his apartment and Scott stays behind to give him what sounds like a very stern talk.

While Scott is dealing with Stiles’ broody, unwilling other half, Stiles sits down the rest of the pack, far away from Derek’s apartment and ears, and rips them a new one. Deep down, he’s touched, of course, but they don’t need to know that.

After that, it gets a little better. He and Derek can be around each other without devolving into petty arguments fifty percent of the time. Being close to Derek is a double-edged sword: he wants to be as close as possible, to breathe, to live, to have everything make _sense_ again, but he hates being so close and knowing that he’s not wanted. It’s more than just the pang of unrequited love. It’s a slap in the face to all of their centuries together, a deliberate disrespect of all of their stolen years.

Sometimes, he just avoids him for days, and sometimes, he camps out on his couch until their barbs start to cut each other too deeply. He leaves bloody and thanks everything he can think of that it’s metaphorical rather than literal.

He’s ragged. It’s painful, riding the coattails of an unfulfilled prophesy, like hearing a song cut off before the end note. Scott pulls him aside and stares at him for a few minutes before giving him a solid bro pat. Stiles doesn’t know what he sees in his face, but it’s enough to have him sticking close to Stiles for days. He’s going to miss him.

“I just wish you’d like me,” he blurts out one day, after Derek spends an hour ignoring him before giving him a lecture on proper safety during a raid.

Derek drops his glass, and it shatters over the stripped cement floor, sparkling a little in the slanted light.

“Never mind,” he sighs, and leaves. It doesn’t really matter, in the end, what happens in the one life when you know you’ll have a hundred more, afterwards.

He’s convinced that this whole life is just a cruel, colorful, lifelike waiting game, which only turns into a slightly more violent waiting game than usual when he finds himself with an arrow through his chest and slowly numbing extremities.

Huh. Maybe he should have listened to Derek’s safety lectures after all.

The blood in his mouth tastes like déjà vu. He manages to remain calm until he realizes that he’s in a ditch on the south side of the forest, when the majority of the pack is in the north. He’s starting to feel cold, and…and is it darker? Or is he blacking out? Or…

Is it cold? Colder? It’s bitter to die before he gets to talk to Derek. And Scott. And…Lydia, Cora…This life was good. He wasn’t a soldier, he wasn’t…much of anything. But he helped people. He _felt_ things.

He felt things.

He’s going to wake up again soon. The world is quiet, and he thinks he can hear howls in the distance. Everything hurts, but everything is cold, and then…then it’s gone. It’s over. He’s going to wake up again.

He opens his eyes and is surprised to be in the ditch, still, with Derek panting above him. Black veins twist up both of his arms, so thick they’re almost solid. His vision spots and flashes, and Derek’s face is light.

“Stiles, I swear to God,” Derek says. Moans—wrecked. “I have watched you die so many fucking times. I can’t—God damn it.”

Stiles thinks he says something. He’s so cold though. His eyes are so heavy. He hopes he doesn’t wake up again. Another life can’t beat this run.

 

***

 

When he wakes up—which, God, he’s so conflicted it actually aches—he lies still for a total of two minutes before flying up and punching Derek in the face. Then he falls over in a coughing fit and Derek has to heft him back into bed. He doesn’t stop and wonder why he’s in Derek’s bed instead of his own.

“You remember! _You fucking remember!_ ”

Derek retreats back onto the couch and sits, broodingly, on the edge. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“ _Liar_ ,” he hisses.

They stare at each other, Derek’s eyes blue like in Vietnam, Salem, and Stiles digs his nails into his hands so hard they draw blood. Eventually Derek says, “I’ve had to watch you die so many times.”

“Yeah, well, you’re not the only one, pal.”

“I looked you up you know, your records—”

“Mistake.”

“You never even _try_ to hold on after I’m gone!”

Which, yeah. Stiles understands the urge to label that unhealthy, and guess what? It totally is! “What’s the point?” he asks. “I’ll wake up in a new body in a new life. What’s the point when I know I’m just waiting to meet you again?”

It sounds like something out of a bad romcom. It feels like a fucking butcher’s knife through his sternum.

Derek growls and shoves his hands through his hair. “I hate watching you die. I hate knowing that you die.”

“Everyone dies,” he says, and Derek slowly settles into stillness. Hit ‘em with the hard truths, the sad truths, the timeless truths, and Stiles always wins. “Try remembering twenty-four-seven.” And Stiles knows that’s not fair. Derek never remembers. It’s the way the curse works. But oh, it hurts.

Derek’s stuck on the couch, body bent wholly into himself like a little origami bird. It’s weird, considering that Derek has always been well, a werewolf. They’re not exactly disposed to crumpling and folding. Not like Stiles is, anyway.

Derek’s apartment isn’t even that big, but the distance between the couch and the bed is insurmountable, an ocean—the Pacific, maybe—yawning meanly between them. Everything about this life is serrated.

Stiles has never been all that great with heavy silence, because it has the unfortunate side-effect of forcing him to look at himself. This time though, the air slowly leaking out of the room bites at him until he processes what Derek had _said_.

“You hate watching me die?” Because yeah, _his_ Derek hated watching him die (he assumes). But this isn’t his Derek, not really.

“Don’t be stupid, Stiles.” His eyes flash—blue again, now—and wow, it makes Stiles’ breath stop. Derek takes a slow, even breath and it feels like a taunt.

Stiles twists on the bed from an agitated need to _move damn it_ , before a sharp pain jabs through his lungs and he collapses back into a pillow. He lets out a frustrated groan, and of _course_ Derek isn’t saying anything, of course he’s just sitting there like so much immovable stone.

(Stiles had sculpted him during the Renaissance, fingers aching to feel his skin instead of pasty marble and he’d gone home and sketched him in charcoal every day for a month. He looked up the sculpture, years later, when he couldn’t find Derek for years. It had been destroyed during some of the petty wars leading to up World War I, and he knows he could always do it again, probably, but it’s still a sick twist in his gut to have their own impermanence tossed in his face.)

He twitches when Derek drops onto the bed, Stiles sliding into the slight depression he creates. Derek extends a careful hand and traces the lines of Stiles’ wrist.

“You’re remembering?”

He swallows around cotton. He’s going to wake up at some point. This has to be a dream. Still, he picks his next words carefully, not wanting to hurt _too_ much. At length, he says, softer than he means, “I always remember.”

Derek squeezes his wrist and it feels like _history._ “I can’t imagine not remembering you. I know I never do,” he adds, quickly, before Stiles can interject, “but I can’t even imagine. I saw you, and I _knew_. I remembered everything.”

Stiles laughs. “That why you were so grumpy, huh?”

“No, that was because I’d just buried my sister. But you didn’t help.”

“I never do.”

Derek sighs and rolls his eyes and pulls him under his arm. “I wasn’t sure you remembered, either, you know. I thought you did, but you were so…you about it.”

Stiles can maybe see how he might have possibly sent some potentially kind of mixed signals. Not that he’ll admit it, of course. This all feels painfully familiar on a lot of levels, or like it will _become_ familiar. At some point in the far future.

“Is that why you were so…you?”

“No,” Derek breathes. “We…seem to die a lot.”

Stiles snorts.

“After we…” he trails off in a huff, and Stiles can’t tell if it’s because it’s too painful for him to say or because it sounds so odd to say out loud. He gets it. Vomiting bleach. And Stiles actually does know exactly how that feels. “I thought maybe if we just stayed away from each other, we wouldn’t—I wouldn’t have to…” he sighs. “Clearly a mistake on my part.”

He doesn’t know what he’s going to do when this life ends. Everything before this seems smeared and dull, like it was the lackluster, painful lead-up to sitting here in Derek’s apartment, awkwardly wrapped in his arms and with the air between them smelling like recognition. He doesn’t want Derek to ever forget him again. He wants to stay here forever, with Derek, and not have to worry about when one of their hearts will stop. He’s never stopped to think what he wanted before, except for Derek. Horrifically, he finds that he might have been harboring some _plans_.

“Salem was a mess,” Derek says, quietly, and Stiles snorts. “I was…for months, you know. Years. They locked me in an asylum.”

“Stop.” Stiles doesn’t want to hear about a heartbroken Derek looking for him in the shapes of other people. He doesn’t even want to think about what _his own_ life would have been like if he’d ever managed to hang on for that long. His fingers dig into Derek’s sides. He wants so badly for him to just stay anchored to his side. “How far back do you remember?”

He’s quiet for so long that Stiles knows exactly how far back he remembers. The sun slips down until the room is mostly in yellowish shadow, dust motes floating sluggishly through the air.

“Far enough to know why this is happening, anyways.” Stiles sighs in response.

They’ve _never_ , not _once_ in all of their years together, talked about _this_. It’s a betrayal, really, of an unspoken pact that neither of them had agreed to. The Hunter’s Moon is a bedtime story that he’s told no one but himself for years, a memory only sharpened by the mist of millennia. He, as he stands today, is so removed from that foggy moonlit hilltop and the smell of acrid herbs and incense that it barely even feels like a memory anymore, barely feels like _him_. But he knows that that life is his only real, rightly-earned one. The only one he deserved to remember, at the very least. He knows he’s still that person, that acidic sacrifice, in some corner of his soul, and nothing else, untainted by centuries of dusty history.

“Does that mean you know how to stop it?”

“I don’t know.” Derek’s voice sounds like a broken promise.

And _oh_ , how Stiles has missed it.

 

***

 

Once, he found Derek bleeding out on the side of the road. He doesn’t remember when. He wants to say the 1830s, but it had been such a hazy life.

He skidded his horse to a halt and almost fell off of it, landing over Derek in a heap of too-young limbs and dreadful happiness. The warm stickiness of the black blood didn’t register with him until he was up to his elbows in it.

“Is that…” Derek’s voice was too brittle, rustling air and coming from across centuries. He lets out a sigh, a death rattle, and it sounds like a quiet “you.”

Stiles sat with him until his heart gave up the losing battle, all through the night. It was a Hunter’s Moon again. Bright and beautiful, so he wouldn’t miss any of the sweat on Derek’s face or the blood soaking into the dirt. The summer air turned cold around them until it bit into Stiles chest with metallic claws.

Stiles sat with him until he was hollow. It’s a memory he only thinks of in past tense.

After that, he spends a lot of lives dying young. Just to break up the monotony.

 

***

 

It’s the Nemeton, of course. If anyone could throw a wrench into Fate’s plans, it’s Deaton, so it doesn’t surprise Stiles in the least. Apparently, death and rebirth are a delicate process when you are, for all intents and purposes, immortal. Delicate to the point of fucking with a centuries-old celestial punishment.

It makes sense. It was Druidic magic, the stolen sacrifice so similar to previous circumstances that of course they interacted. Of course. Of course.

“I don’t like it,” Derek whispers against his ear one night. Stiles agrees, but he’s not in a position to do any critical thinking.

They’d agreed. They wanted to make the most of this life, when Derek remembered and Stiles could feel things other than dull endless aches. They talk about memories, the ones that don’t make Stiles want to run or Derek grow silent and distant. Derek laughs when he remembers Greece. He says nothing when he remembers the Great War.

Stiles can’t shake the sense of transience that clings to him. This life, for all the running and fighting and saving they do, feels so much less urgent and frenzied than the others. He knows he could die tomorrow. But it feels like home. It feels like home when Scott calls them all to his house for a pack meeting and Lydia is arguing over movies with Isaac. It feels like home when Scott, with a smirk, slips him a book that Stiles had written years ago, and when Derek ambushes him with a pasta dinner and movies that he knows in his soul that Stiles loves.

Cora yelled at him for not telling her sooner. Then she flew down, saying she’d signed up for online classes. Derek was thunderous, and it seemed like overkill, but. Well. The rest of the pack is less weird now that Derek knows. They don’t really talk about the memories with them, but one night Stiles gets drunk and regales them with stories of the Renaissance, because he’d had a lot of good years as an artist there before he and Derek went out in a blaze of glory. Literally. They suffocated in a church fire, but more importantly, Stiles had once had his paintings complimented by Da Vinci. Cora enjoys hearing about her (unremembered) possible past life as a countess. She glitters in the autumn firelight like royalty, and Stiles lets himself think that he can find them all again. He only gets that drunk around them the once.

But the Nemeton. When Deaton calls them in to tell them (because they’re finally a _them_ , the two of them), it makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is the other part.

“You can _fix us?_ ”

Deaton’s eyes are pale and maybe not as ancient as his, but old.

“How?” demands Derek, frustrated and painfully hopeful.

“You won’t like it.”

 

***

 

Stiles _doesn’t like it_.

 

***

 

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Derek asks him, one night, because they’ve been necessarily putting it off for weeks and Stiles can feel a young death starting to creep up on them. They never stay together long. “I might remember next time.”

They’re sprawled out over Derek’s bed, home from a day helping his dad clean out the garage. It feels surreal to have Derek meeting his dad, like this is in any way a normal relationship, like this is a _lasting_ one. They never last. They endure. Stiles traces Derek’s jawline with light fingers and burrows closer to him under the heavy blanket. He gets cold so easily, now and then.

“You might not,” Stiles says, and doesn’t say _it might kill me_. He knows the next life will be especially painful. This one has been too good not to force Fate’s hand towards retribution.

Derek’s heartbeat under Stiles’ chest is steady and sure. “I don’t want to do this.” The words seem forced out of Derek, the way they do when he’s struggling with memories of Kate and of thousands of years ganging up on him together, but he struggles gamely on. “But I don’t want to forget you.”

“Then we have to.”

They’ve never had to do anything before, not really. But look where that’s got them.

 

***

 

They put it off. So many things could go wrong. Every night, they stay up late talking, and it’s…something to hear it all from Derek’s side. The sex it great, don’t get Stiles wrong, but he hasn’t spent millennia chasing after Derek because of his great horizontal tango. The talking is always his favorite part—a romantic, maybe, at his core—but this time it seems _so real_ , and Stiles wonders if it’s just the immediacy of it.

The thing about Derek is that he’s good. He’s an asshole. But he’s good. Stiles has peered way down into the black and pitted depths of Derek’s soul, but he’s never once stopped being good and striving to be good. To have him here now, his eyes lighting on Stiles with a mythical sense of fondness, is almost too much. Sometimes he tricks himself into thinking they have forever with the pack in this glaring, beautiful, vibrant life. But he knows they don’t, so when the night comes, they find themselves in the woods.

The pack meeting had been quiet—tearful, maybe. Stiles wanted to look everywhere but their faces, but he wanted to engrain them all into his memory at the same time. He never wanted to forget Scott’s smile, Allison’s laugh, Lydia’s fierce glare. She’d begged them, before, to think of something else. Tonight, she’d been better; defiant and strong. Derek had enveloped them all in his arms and his presence and made them all sit while Stiles quietly told them exactly what they meant to him.

It had taken ages to talk Derek down to this deal. He was torn, as he always was. But then he thought of Cora, and well. This life was full of meaning. Derek could never leave her. Stiles wouldn’t want him to.

“You’ll always be my brother,” said Scott.

“I’ll look for you,” said Stiles.

That was the end of that.

He doesn’t want to think about what they told his dad, or his dad’s face, or anything. Stiles does love him. So much. But he’s pack. He’ll be fine.

And now Stiles is staring at Derek across a clearing in the woods, near the hollow shell of the Hale house and next to the blighted stump of the goddamn Nemeton. The Hunter’s Moon shines above them, glaring through the trees. The autumn air is strangely biting around them, but Derek, well. Derek is always warm.

His hands trail over Stiles shoulders, slicked with oil. It had been an endeavor to get the herbs and oils, a combination of the real thing and close substitutes from Deaton and eBay. They smell like memory, sharp and inescapable. It’s so dark that Stiles can barely see Derek’s face, until a stray moonbeam falls on them like a spotlight. Appropriate.

Derek’s hands slowly grow and melt into claws, his face only semi-shifted, the brilliant blue of his eyes anchoring Stiles to this time and place, instead of another, far back in the river of memory. Goosebumps raise on his arms as the sharp points of Derek’s claws graze his pulse points. His legs melt when Derek bites at his neck, so that Derek is completely supporting him. The picture of a willing sacrifice.

“I didn’t want to do this back then, either,” Derek whispers. “You have no idea what you smell like.”

“Death?” Stiles asks.

Derek inhales sharply, his eyes falling closed. His hands are shaking. “Like _life_.” Stiles can feel himself flush, his blood rushing so fast he’s sure his heart will stop. The rapid, steady thuds make him clutch harder at Derek, smearing oil on his jacket and the hot skin of his forearms.

“I love you,” Derek says, voice a ghost in Stiles’ ear. He shakes harder. “So, so much.” He moves his hands across Stiles’ bare chest, settling one on his rabbiting heart and the other firm around his waist. The points of his claw dig into Stiles’ pectorals, making little dark dents. “I’m going to find you again. I don’t care if that’s what the curse wants. I swear I will.”

Stiles can barely breathe around Derek’s vice-like grip on him. It’s only because of the sudden chill on his cheeks that he realizes that he’s crying, however softly. “I love you. I love you.” He means to say it like a truth, but it slips out as a prayer. “I love you.”

Derek’s lips on his feel like fire. They’re a promise. They melt together, like they always do. Like they were meant to.

His teeth dig into Stiles’ lips as the jagged edges of his claws do the same. Stiles has died so many times, but this. This is how he was meant to go out. “Derek,” he chokes, when it all becomes too much, and Derek lays him down on the chill forest floor, covers him with his body, arms going black with stolen pain, and pulls back to lay a dry kiss on his forehead.

“Wait for me, Stiles. Okay? We’ll all be there soon. Soon—shhhhh.” His hands, slick with the blood and oil they should have been coated in centuries ago, stroke over Stiles’ arms, his shoulders, his chest, his neck. “I promise I’ll remember.”

Stiles sighs, the cold of blood loss settling into his limbs. Everything is so much. If his last exhale sounds like Derek’s name, his _first_ name, from the history books, well then. They never really stopped being the Druid and the Big Bad Wolf, did they?

 

***

 

“I couldn’t ever make cold something as warm as you,” Derek says, the first time around, after he’d herded Stiles, protesting, down the windy hill and into his den.

Teeth chattering, Stiles said, “I’m always cold.”

“We’ll have to fix that, won’t we?”

He’d licked the oil and runes off of his body. That’s where it began.

“I love you,” Stiles said, when the Hunter’s Moon had slipped below the horizon.

“You don’t know what love is.”

“You don’t love me?”

“Oh, I do. Forever.”

And he had.

 

***

 

Stiles wakes up to white. Heaven. Or maybe Hell. It’s hard to say.

“Stiles?”

He blinks, and the shifting shadows thrown by the trees above come into focus through the flares of the sun. His arm, when he manages to lift it, is heavy and crusted with blood. Some flakes into his eyes.

“Derek?” He lets his head fall to the side, the earth cool against his cheek. Derek’s eyes are wide, ancient, steely grey.

Derek pulls himself up and rubs at his beard with both big hands. “Are we still…You’re alive.” He seems conflicted about this, eyes darting between Stiles and, shiftily, the Nemeton. “This still seems like Beacon Hills.”

“It is.”

His hands fall, the color draining from his face, and Stiles sees that his nails are caked with shimmery, rusty red. “Did it not work?”

Stiles’ arms are heavy. When he pokes his chest, he finds it smooth and unblemished, like a werewolf’s after a fight. The trees shift in the wind above them and the sun seems sharp and…and memorable. Final. “I feel different.”

Derek rolls over onto him and stares into his face. Stiles is unbearably hot in the warm morning air. “We’ll find out eventually. But whatever happens, we’ll be together. Right?”

Stiles smiles up at him, and it feels weightless. “Of course.”

 

***

 

When they wake up for the last time, years and years later, it’s white again. Scott is on his right, and Lydia is on his left, everyone else farther on up the hill, looking like they did back in their twenties and thirties, smiling. When Stiles sees Derek, his eyes sparkle with recognition, and when they crash together, it’s lasting. It’s real.

“Found you,” says Derek, his nose tickling through Stiles’ hair.

**Author's Note:**

> About the death: Stiles and Derek die in this (a lot) and always get reincarnated. They die for realsies at the end, though it's non-explicit and implied to be at the end of a long life well-lived.
> 
> About the unhealthy relationships: Stiles and Derek give up on life pretty quickly after the other one dies.
> 
> So! I haven't written a ton of angst, and wanted some practice writing death scenes; that's where this is coming from. This was so fun to write, but pretty much Hell itself to edit, and I did a lot of experimental stuff soooo lemme know whatcha think? Can you guys tell I was reading Wuthering Heights while I wrote this, and Beloved while I edited?


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